A Florida couple was kidnapped while on vacation in Haiti. According to family members, the couple is now being held on increasing ransom demands they cannot meet.
Jean-Dickens Toussaint and his wife, Abigail Toussaint, were visiting Haiti to see ailing relatives and attend a community festival when they were kidnapped on March 18 while traveling on a bus from Port-au-Prince, ABC News reports.
“They stopped the bus at a stop and then asked for Americans to get off the bus and their escorts off the bus, and then they took them,” Christie Desormes, who says she’s the couple’s niece, told ABC News affiliate WPLG.
The family said they learned about the ransom demands after a friend escorting the Toussaints contacted relatives. After paying the $6,000 demanded, the family said, the kidnappers changed the amount to $200,000 per hostage, according to CNN.
Desormes has started an online petition calling for help and asking U.S. officials to step in, as the family does not “have that type of money.”
“They are parents. They are siblings. They are my family. They are loved, and most of all, they are people who desperately need your help,” part of the statement on the change.org petition reads.
The couple, from Tamarac, Fla., are both 33 years old and have a child who turns two years old this week, according to Desormes.
A US State Department spokesperson told CNN they are “aware of reports of two U.S. citizens missing in Haiti.”
“When a U.S. citizen is missing, we work closely with local authorities as they carry out their search efforts, and we share information with families however we can,” the spokesperson said. “We have nothing further to share at this time.”
Given Haiti’s current political unrest and gang violence, family members say they expressed concern about the couple taking this trip.
“We were very worried when they said they were going. We told them not to go, but they wanted to go,” Nikese Toussaint, the sister of Jean Dickens Toussaint, told ABC News.
The State Department advises Americans not to travel to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, and civil unrest.”